‘John Lennon’s Dead’: Stories of Protest, Hunger Strikes & Resistance

Armagh’s Victorian prison

By Síle Darragh
Beyond the Pale Publications, Belfast. Price €12

Reviewed by Laurence McKeown
Former H-Blocks prisoner

THE FIRST THING I like about this book is its wonderful title. It’s original. It’s thought-provoking. You wonder what exactly John Lennon’s death has to do with republican prisoner activities of protest, hunger strikes, and general acts of resistance – but you’ll need to read the book to find out.
What you’ll learn about is how young women not only survived in Armagh’s Victorian prison from 1976 to 1981 – the harshest and bleakest period of prison protests – but how they fought back. Their comradeship, their determination, their resilience comes through in every word. But this isn’t just a story of who can endure the most, or of ‘RTPs’ (‘Rough, Tough Provies’) like the three Síle dedicates the book to. It’s a human story.
Síle was the IRA O/C in Armagh during the 1980 Hunger Strike and until her release in 1981. She speaks of vulnerability, of her doubts when entering prison and wondering if she was following correct republican procedures, of the comradely arguments she had with Mairead (Farrell) at the time of the Hunger Strikes, of her concern for the elderly non-political prisoner who should never have been held in a prison, of ‘Deirdre’ (not her real name) who wanted so much to be on the protest but who was ordered off it because of serious concerns for her health.
Síle tells of Bobby’s (Sands) last comm to her and, in his words, far removed from the iconic image people now have of him, we see again Bobby’s playful, youthful persona: “Am I forgiven? Do you still love me? Ha! It’s Mary Doyle has me like this, you know. I used to be a quiet wee lad – honest to God!”
Síle smuggled that comm and others out of the prison and had them stored in a safe place. Twenty years later, in 2001, she re-read them and speaks of how she cried. “Once more I was that young woman of 23 sitting in a cell in Armagh Gaol.” All the more poignant when we recall that Síle was a young woman of 18 when she first entered prison. The prisons were full of our young people then but, as this story points out, they rose to the challenge before them. And, in the midst of it all, could laugh, and cry, and hope, and rage – and still identify with a different world, the world of John Lennon. Imagine.